Although I now have to be surgically removed from my laptop, I am someone who started my family history in the years B.C. (before computers). I thought therefore that I would just mention some of the pros and cons of the changes I have seen over 37 years of seriously pursuing my ancestors. By the way I did start very young (wait for Y for more on that topic).

In the old days, finding our family was a much slower process and involved travelling to various record repositories. You went to London, ordered a birth certificate, waited for it to arrive and then waited again for your next trip to London in order to search for the marriage certificate of the parents of that individual. This can now all be done from home and the turn around time is much quicker, so a big tick for the internet on this one.

In order to find someone in a census return a visit to London or the relevant county record office was required. Then you peered at reels of microfilm as you spent two hours winding your way through the whole of Hackney in pursuit of your ancestors. Alternatively you could hope that there was a paper index for the area and decade that you were searching. These indexes were carefully and accurately compiled by family historians whose motivation was to assist their fellow researchers, with no hint of financial benefits. Today’s countrywide indexes are a huge bonus, especially if searches can be made using fields such as occupation and birthplace, instead of by name, thus opening up these records for use by social and local historians. The quality of these indexes is however mixed. Many of them have been created by those with no interest in the work, by those who have no knowledge of British place or personal names and by those whose prime motivation is financial. In Peter Christian’s The Genealogists’ Internet, he looks at transcription errors in the 1891 census indexes that appear on the main subscription websites. In 2009, when the survey was done, 43.5% of the surnames in the Ancestry transcription were incorrect. Hopefully many of these have been corrected in the intervening five years but this is a very high error rate. Don’t get me wrong these indexes are valuable and I know that if their production was left to philanthropic family historians, with the skills and motivation to get it right, we would still be waiting but it is not all good news.

I applaud and welcome the opportunity to download digital images of original documents from my arm chair. Sadly most of these images are accessed via a transcript and many internet genealogists rely on those transcriptions, never progressing to the originals. At a conference last year, lecturer and author John Titford coined the phrase ‘genealogy for grown-ups’. By this he meant the sort of genealogy where original sources are consulted and referenced. He was referring to research that encompasses recreating the lives of our ancestors, not just collecting names and dates and the use of more than just the mainstream sources that are available on subscription websites. The internet helps ‘grown-up’ genealogists beyond measure but to come of age in the genealogical world you do still need to leave your keyboard behind on occasions.

Now family trees can be downloaded at the press of a button (the result may not be an accurate family tree but a family tree emerges none the less) there is the opportunity to acquire a pedigree without foundations. More people can open a computer file labelled ‘family tree’ but they lack basic knowledge about the lives of those individuals or the sources that have been used to create that pedigree. Does this actually matter? It is surely a good thing that more people are beginning to engage with their past, particularly as this has resulted in a dramatic lowering of the average age of the family historian. Am I concerned that these people are barely scratching the surface and are not doing things ‘properly’? At the risk if being labelled a genealogy snob, well yes I am. Surely the satisfaction comes from ensuring that your pedigree is as accurate as possible. Trying to recreate the context for our ancestors’ lives is truly paying them the respect they deserve. Yes, everyone should be able to pursue their ancestry in their own way and with a degree of rigor of their choosing but I still lament the trend towards ‘grab it quick’ pedigree hunting. Along with the internet has come instant access genealogy but have we compromised thoroughness in the pursuit of speed?

We are now in thrall to the large subscription websites. Yes, there is a choice but currently it is a frying pan – fire choice. In the last few weeks there has, rightly, been an avalanche of complaints about the ‘improvements’ made by more than one genealogical service provider. Suffice it to say that these changes appear to lack any single benefit for the serious researcher. The impression is that ‘improvements’ have been motivated by profit and carried out by those who have no idea what researchers require. At the moment the family history world is holding its breath, hoping fervently that the providers will actually listen to the needs of their customers. The provision of online resources is only progress if the system allows researchers to find the record that they need in a manner that is neither convoluted nor cumbersome.

The sad loss for the new generation of internet genealogists is the lack of interaction. True there are forums, chat rooms and opportunities for discussions via Hangouts on Air but are these really a substitute for a cosy chat over a genealogical brick wall with a group of fellow enthusiasts? I am not an unalleviated Luddite. I do appreciate that internet genealogy is not only here to stay but has a great deal to offer researchers. I am however aware that we maybe in danger of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water.

Are you a family historian or a genealogist? Personally I call myself a family historian, although I undertake genealogical research as part of my family history. I am aware that the meaning of ‘genealogy’ varies in different parts of the world.

The genealogist constructs a pedigree

To me, genealogy is creating a pedigree, joining individuals together and establishing relationships between them. It is, quite literally ‘gene ology’. It is possible to do genealogy without being a family historian but a family historian must also be a genealogist.

A family historian creates the underlying pedigree but then looks beyond the names and relationships to study the national, local and social historical context that helps us to understand the lives of those individuals. A family historian wants to know what was happening in the town or village where their family lived. They aim to find out what their ancestor may have eaten or worn and what their home might have been like. They will study the occupations of their ancestors so they know what tools those ancestors would have used, what uniform they may have worn and what processes that form of employment could have involved. If individuals moved, then the family historian might look at possible route ways and motivations for that change of location. They will consider national events that those ancestors lived through and how these may have impacted on their lives. To me it is the family history, rather than the genealogy, that is the real appeal. What use is a list of names and dates when you have no conception of the lives that these people led?

The family historian wants to know where the individuals lived

So which are you, family historian or genealogist? And which would you rather be?

What is evidence? Is someone else’s online tree ‘evidence’? There are some accurate and well researched family trees online. Equally there are some that are beyond fanciful, with people having children five years after they have died, or at the age of three. Then there are the creative genealogists who subscribe to such theories as, ‘They got married in 1825 so they must have been born in 1800’, because of course everyone gets married at the age of 25. Or ‘I have someone of roughly the right name in roughly the right place, the age is a couple of years out but hey it must be him.’ Have you actually looked for alternatives? How complete are the indexes you are using? Could there be equally, or even more, suitable alternatives in records that have yet to be included in that index? How well do you actually understand the data set that you are asking your subscription website of choice to search? And then there is my pet hate, ‘He was baptised in 1750 so he must have been born in 1750’. Why? How do you know? Do you actually have any evidence beyond the knowledge that the majority of baptisms were of young infants? What you should be doing, if you must assign a date at all, is recording that birth as about 1750 and looking for corroborating evidence that this was indeed that individual’s date if birth. If that evidence is not forthcoming then the about remains.

There is also the question of how much proof do you require? How much evidence do you seek before adding an individual to your family tree? One piece of evidence? Two? Three? Clearly what is key here is the quality and likely reliability of that evidence. One person has recorded this on their online family tree, to my mind is next to worthless as evidence. Ah, you may say but five people have the same line on their online family tree. How do you know that researchers (and I use the term loosely) two to five have not just lifted researcher one’s information and grafted it on to their tree?

Forget online trees for a moment. What about ‘granny says…….’. This maybe ok, how is granny’s memory? Do great auntie and great uncle agree with her? Are there any official documents, birth certificates, newspaper reports, census returns, to back this up? The further back our family trees extend the harder it becomes to find one piece of reliable evidence, let alone anything that might be termed corroboration. This is the point at which you should stop scrambling backwards, pause until new evidence is unearthed and enjoy finding out more about the individuals that you already have whilst you wait.

Researching the Smith family of London requires more corroborating evidence

The size of the population in the area and era that you are researching and the name of the individual may also effect how much evidence you feel you need before deciding that you have linked two records correctly. I am searching for a John Smith (yes really) in London in the late 1700s. If I find a baptism of a John Smith in London in 1799, even if the John Smith is in the parish where ‘my’ John Smith married do I make that connection? – probably not. Even if I have ‘my’ John Smith’s place and approximate date of birth from the 1851 census do I? If the place is a highly populated London parish maybe still no. If I know ’my’ John Smith’s father’s name (from his marriage certificate for example) and that agrees (especially if it is a more unusual christian name) then maybe I am getting somewhere. On the other hand, if I have a Crispin Pepperell in a small rural Devon parish (and I do) then I may be quicker to assume I have the correct person.

I appreciate that many people live thousands of miles from the focus of their research but this is not a reason to accept second hand ‘evidence’. As far as I am concerned an original source, or a digital image of that source is evidence, an index or transcription is not. Agreed, transcriptions and indexes are brilliant finding aids and providing they are done well, can lead us to original sources but they are not evidence in themselves. Ironically, it seems that the easier it becomes to access original records at a distance, the less people are seeking them out and the more content they are to rely on indirect data or non-evidence. I accept that there are many rigorous and diligent researchers out there but increasingly I see works of fiction family trees where the compiler appears to require no evidence at all.

If people get fun out of building the biggest family tree in the world by melding their data with that of others without checking it, without researching it, without even thinking about it, who am I to spoil their fun? Just don’t kid yourselves that this is family history or even genealogy (there is a difference – see my ‘F’ blog tomorrow). This is mere pedigree hunting and the pedigree you have snared is highly likely to be inaccurate or not your own. As Anthony Camp, former Director of the Society of Genealogists, once said, ‘With poor knowledge of the sources and little care, the person who comes out of the shadows may just be a skeleton or more often a botched up monster of a Frankenstein, two people rolled into one, or one cut down the middle and married off to someone he probably never knew in real life’.

Well you were warned – today I begin to wend my way through the alphabet for the month of April, as part of the A to Z blogging challenge. Hopefully I can provide useful information and add to the debate amongst fellow history addicts, interspersed with non-alphabetical general happenings. So……..

A is for Agricultural Labourers

Every family tree has them, the ubiquitous Ag Labs and we tend to treat them as an amorphous group, frequently neglecting to find out more about their lives. How often do we hear, ‘My family tree is really boring, it is all Ag Labs’? As with any ancestor’s occupation, we owe it to those ancestors to find out more about what the job entailed. What tools were used? What clothes were worn What innovations or processes took place in their field (no pun intended) during their working lives?

Not all agricultural labourers are the same. Use maps, local sources and Google Street View to find out about the terrain. Can you discover what the soil type is in the area? Tithe Maps of the 1830s and 1840s will tell you about the land use on the farms where your ancestor may have worked. The National Farm Survey of 1941, held at The National Archives, will give a more up to date picture. Look at the British county by county General Surveys of Agriculture, written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Here is the volume for Devon . Another excellent book about West Country Agriculture is The Husbandry of Devon and Cornwall by Robin Staines, Andrew Jewell and Richard Bass (Stanes 2008).

The DVDs and books that resulted from the Victorian, Edwardian, World War II and Tudor Monastery Farm television programmes are invaluable. As a result of the Victorian Farm series, The Book of the Farm that the team used as a source, has been reprinted, with an introduction by Alex Langlands. This is a great insight into Victorian Farming techniques.

Visit if you can The Museum of English Rural Life or its Scottish equivalent. See also the Rural Museums’ Network. Find exhibitions of old farm implements or best of all spend time doing some of the tasks your ancestor would have done. There is nothing like a day spent picking stones or weeding potatoes in the rain to bring home just how difficult life was.

Follow up some of these suggestions, read some of the books below, then decide if your agricultural labourers really are boring.

Thanks to Mike and Rosie Smith for this image

Waller, Ian My Ancestor Was an Agricultural Labourer (SOG 2008).
Handford, Kay The Agricultural Labourer in 19th Century England (Grosvenor House Publishing 2011).
Brown, Jonathan Tracing Your Rural Ancestors: a guide for family historians (Pen & Sword 2011).
Hammond, John & Barbara The Village Labourer (The History Press 2005).
Porter, Valerie Yesterday’s Farm: a taste of rural life from the past (David and Charles 2008).
Rogers, J Thorold A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (Oxford University Press 1882).
Reay, Barry Rural Englands (Palgrave MacMillan 2004).
Humphries, Steve and Hopwood, Beverley Green and Pleasant Land: the untold story if country life in twentieth century Britain (Channel 4 Books 1999).
Fussell, G E The English Rural Labourer; his home, furniture, clothing & food, from Tudor to Victorian times (Batchworth Press 1949).